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Kid Size: The Material World of Childhood : AnExhibition ReviewAbigail A. Van SlyckConnecticut College, aavan@conncoll.edu

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Recommended CitationVan Slyck, Abigail, A. "Kid Size: The Material World of Childhood: An Exhibition Review," in Winterthur Portfolio, 39 no. 1 (Spring2004): 69-78.

Kid Size: The Material World of Childhood : An Exhibition Review

KeywordsWadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, April–August 2004, Oklahoma City Museumof Art, Oklahoma City, December 2004–March 2005, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, April– September2005, Alexander von Vegesack, Jutta Oldiges, Lucy Bullivant

CommentsSource: Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Spring 2004), pp. 69-78

Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum,Inc.

© 2004 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. All rights reserved. 0084-0416/04/3901-0004

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/431010

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Kid Size: The Material World

of Childhood

An Exhibition Review

Abigail A. Van Slyck

Abigail A. Van Slyck is the Dayton Associate Professor of ArtHistory at Connecticut College.Kid Size: The Material World of Childhood. WadsworthAtheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut,April–August 2004; Oklahoma City Museum ofArt, Oklahoma City, December 2004–March 2005;Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, April–September 2005.

Alexander von Vegesack, Jutta Oldiges, and LucyBullivant, eds. Kid Size: The Material World of Child-hood. Milan: Skira editore; Weil am Rhein, Ger.:Vitra Design Museum, 1997. 315 pp.; 492 illus-trations, bibliography. $45.00.

CHILDREN ARE EVERYWHERE, especiallyin the museum world where exhibitionson the material culture of childhood have

been increasingly cropping up since 1990. Inthat year, the Canadian Centre for Architecturemounted what would prove to be the first in a se-ries of exhibitions featuring architectural toys andgames; the seventh installation, Toys and Transport,closed in 2001. Although relatively small (most fea-tured between eighteen and thirty objects), each ofthese exhibitions was accompanied by a slim vol-ume containing a thoughtful essay by an architector architectural historian. Also focused on toys wasKid Stuff: Great Toys from Our Childhood. Organizedby the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachu-

setts, this exhibition of more than two hundred toysopened in 1999 and has been traveling nationallyever since.

Children’s summer camps have also attractedthe attention of museum curators. A Worthy Use ofSummer: Jewish Summer Camping in America debutedin1993 at the National Museum of American JewishHistory in Philadelphia, and in 1999 Summer Campopened at the Museum of Our National Heritage(now the National Heritage Museum) in Lexing-ton, Massachusetts. More recently, the AdirondackMuseum in Blue Mountain Lake, New York, orga-nized ‘‘A Paradise for Boys and Girls’’: Children’s Campsin the Adirondacks, on display through the summer of2004.

Local history museums have also gotten intothe act, with such exhibitions as Seen and Not Heard:Facets of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century New Orleansat the Historic New Orleans Collection (1998–99).Others in this vein include Dressing for a New YorkChildhood, organized by the Museum of the City ofNew York (2001); Grow Up! The Derby ChildhoodExperience, on display at the Industrial Museum inDerbyshire, England (2003–4); and Growing Up inMontreal, which opened at the McCord Museum ofCanadian History in fall 2004.

Broader chronologically and conceptually wasKiDS! 200 Years of Childhood, an exhibition at Win-terthur from 1999 to 2001. Focusing on the Amer-ican context between 1700 and 1900, KiDS! usedpaintings, prints, books, toys, furniture, and otherobjects to demonstrate how adult perceptions ofchildren affected the texture of children’s lives athome, at school, and at play as well as how indus-trialization dramatically altered those perceptions.The exhibition’s British counterparts include ACentury of Childhood (at the Preservation Trust Mu-seum, St. Andrew’s, Scotland, May 29–October

Abigail A. Van Slyck is the Dayton Associate Professor of ArtHistory at Connecticut College.

The author thanks Tom Denenberg for his help in iden-tifying the contributions of the Wadsworth Atheneum staff to theexhibition on display in Hartford and Trina Bowman for her as-sistance in securing illustrations.

n 2004 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum,Inc. All rights reserved. 0084-0416/04/3901-0004 $3.00

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2004) and Childhood: From Perambulators to PlaySta-tion (at the Royal Pump House Museum, Harro-gate in 2004–5). Somewhat comparable in scopeis Archaeologies of Childhood: The First Years of Lifein Roman Egypt, on display at the Kelsey Museumof Archaeology at the University of Michigan,2003–4.

Artistic representations of childhood—a dis-tinct but related topic—have also been highlightedin a number of exhibitions in the last decade. Theseinclude The New Child: British Art and the Origins ofModernChildhood,1730–1830,organized by the Uni-versity Art Museum in Berkeley, California, in 1995;Fair and Free: Images of Childhood, 1824–1992 at theNational Academy Museum in New York in 1997–98; The Darker Side of Playland: Childhood Imagery inthe Logan Collection at San Francisco’s Museum ofModern Art in 2000–2001; Growing Up: Childhood inAmerican andNativeAmericanArt at the Montclair ArtMuseum in Montclair, New Jersey, in 2004; andComing of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhoodfrom the Classical Past at the Getty Center in 2004 aswell.

Kid Size: The Material World of Childhood mightbe considered the blockbuster of this genre (fig.1).Organized by the Vitra Museum in Weil am Rhein,

Germany, Kid Size spans four centuries, touches onfive continents, and features 130 objects on loanfrom multiple museums and private collections. Af-ter opening in1997 at the Kunsthall in Rotterdam—a Rem Koolhaus–designed building that may be oneof the hippest venues in Europe—it started an ex-tensive tour, traveling to museums in Switzerland,Germany, Croatia, Denmark, Norway, Great Britain,Italy, Japan, and Spain. The North American legof the tour began in the spring of 2004 at theWadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut; itis currently scheduled to travel through the fall of2005, with stops at the Oklahoma City Museum ofArt and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.True, the exhibition involves neither advance res-ervations nor long lines, but the massive and lavishlyillustrated catalogue signals the organizers’ aspira-tions to define the field for years to come.

At one level, this flood of exhibitions on thematerial culture of childhood seems to be a natu-ral outgrowth of scholarly trends. Scholars from arange of disciplinary perspectives have brought re-newed vigor to the history of childhood—hostingconferences, editing collections of essays, launch-ing encyclopedia projects, and producing mono-graphs in quantity. Equally important, however,

Fig. 1. Installation, Kid Size: The Material World of Childhood, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn.(Courtesy of Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.)

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these works confirm that the field is emerging fromthe long shadow cast by Philippe Aries’s classic1960work, Centuries of Childhood.1 Rather than debatingthe moment when ‘‘our’’ notion of childhood as awarm, happy, and carefree time first emerged (a Eu-rocentric pursuit, if ever there was one), historiansare now offering a more sustained consideration ofthe ways in which a child’s social location—culture,class, gender, religion, age—affect the experienceof being young. Studies of material culture are animportant part of this trend, evidenced by ‘‘Design-ing Modern Childhoods,’’ an international inter-disciplinary conference held at the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley in2002, and the resulting vol-ume of essays currently under contract with RutgersUniversity Press.

Yet, these exhibitions also seem to speak to a setof cultural anxieties that are (to a certain extent)independent of scholarly trends. Indeed, whilescholars focus on childhood as a cultural constructinexorably linked to the attitudes and actions ofadults, the exhibitions tend to emphasize childhood

as a special realm to which adults can only gain en-tree by visiting the museum.

This trend is particularly pronounced at KidSize, where most of the objects are displayed onundulating platforms provided by Vitra’s exhibi-tion designers. Remarkably effective at providingready visual access to objects that vary dramaticallyin size, they nonetheless break with display con-ventions associated with the adult world of themuseum, substituting instead something akin tothe magic carpets on which youthful imaginationis understood to take flight. Wadsworth designersCecil Adams and Mark Giuliano reinforced thattone by devising entry portals and room dividersusing primary colors and simple geometricalforms—the dominant visual codes of childhoodin the modern world (fig. 2). Overscaled, theseelements were intended to remind adults of whatit feels like to be small. Likewise, the WadsworthAtheneum staff created ‘‘baseball’’ cards to guidechildren through the exhibition, involving youngvisitors in a performance of childness that becomespart of the display. The implications of the instal-lation design were not lost on journalists. Indeed,The New York Times Home Design Magazine describedthe exhibition as ‘‘as thick and rich as an ice-cream

Fig. 2. Installation,Kid Size: TheMaterialWorld of Childhood,Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn. (Courtesyof Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.)

1 Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of FamilyLife, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962).

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sundae,’’ while the Hartford Courant ran a reviewunder the headline ‘‘Age of Innocence.’’2

How are we to understand these invitations toexperience the world through the eyes of a child(to paraphrase the McCord Museum’s tagline forGrowing Up in Montreal )? Are they simply attemptsto harness nostalgia in the name of enhancing mu-seum visitation rates? Or could they be a responseto more profound concerns that childhood itselfmay be on the brink of extinction? After all, it is notjust that prepubescent children are aping adultbehaviors but that puberty itself is arriving earlierthan ever before (at least in Europe and the UnitedStates). Might the appeal of exhibitions on the ma-terial culture of childhood rest in their reassurancethat childhood itself still exists? If so, how readilydoes that comforting message fit with the scholar-ship upon which such exhibitions are based? It isthis last question that came to mind as I visited KidSize in Hartford.

First, a disclaimer. Organized by the preemi-nent museum of modern furniture design, Kid Sizeis primarily an exhibition of furniture. Despite itssubtitle, it does not attempt to present a compre-hensive treatment of childhood’s material manifes-tations. Clothes, dolls, games, books, eating utensils,playground equipment, and architectural settingsdesigned specifically for use by children—these arenowhere to be found. As a result, the story is not asrich as it might have been, foreclosing intriguingpossibilities for reading the material expression ofgender that clothes might have provided and mak-ing it impossible to investigate how culturally con-structed notions of childhood have been expressedin different media.

Not that Kid Size pushes any interpretation veryfar. According to Thomas Denenberg, RichardKoopman Curator of American Decorative Arts atthe Wadsworth Atheneum, the exhibition’s orga-nizers supplied labels that addressed primarily for-mal issues. Expanding upon those texts, Denenbergand Assistant Curator Trina Bowman introducedwall panels in which they stated the general themesfor the exhibition (to wit, that ‘‘Furniture andplaythings—the stuff of childhood—communicateexplicit messages about adult attitudes, expecta-tions, and desires for their offspring’’) and its sixmajor sections (sleep, basic functions, play, mobil-ity, formal learning, and seating). They also in-

troduced expanded labels to provide more specificinformation about the construction and functionof each object. Short of recurating the exhibition,however, they could not undo the fact that theinstallation was organized to emphasize childhooduniversals; the section on mobility, for instance, ismeant to demonstrate that designs encouraging‘‘thrilling but safe exploration of the environmentcan be found around the world.’’ Evidently, theorganizers count on viewers to delve into the densecatalogue essays for the culturally and historicallyspecific information required to understand ‘‘adultattitudes, expectations, and desires’’ that the fea-tured objects are intended to convey. As a result,the interpretation available in the gallery is sparseindeed.

Nonetheless, the breadth and depth of furni-ture presented in Kid Size are breathtaking. Theexhibition is strongest in European furniture fromthe 1880s to the present, reflecting not only thestrengths of the Vitra collection but also the his-torical fact that English and American Victoriansand their European counterparts generated anunprecedented amount of material ‘‘stuff’’ to re-inforce and celebrate their view of children as nat-urally innocent, even angelic. Just a quick scan ofthe gallery confirms that modern designers con-tinued the trend, inventing a new visual code ofchildhood, one that depended on primary colorsand simple geometric forms. This code remainslargely in force (including in the design of theWadsworth Atheneum installation itself), al-though by the late twentieth century, designers be-gan to emphasize flexible pieces able to take onother functions as a child grows and develops newskills and interests.

The important role of furniture in framingculturally constructed views of childhood is partic-ularly clear in Victorian contributions to the ma-terial world of childhood, chief among them theelevated crib, the high chair with integral food tray,and the baby carriage (or pram). Well representedin Kid Size, the three share several characteristics.They each served to elevate the child, making itvisible and marking its symbolic importance. Allthree provided a mechanism for bringing the childinto the adult world while foreclosing any possi-bility that the child would disrupt that well-orderedrealm. By keeping the infant’s more demonic ten-dencies at bay, these objects became essential forseeing the child as inherently angelic. Finally, theyall allowed adults to interact with their beloved chil-dren while keeping physical contact to a minimum—something that was especially important for parents

2 Sandra Ballentine, ‘‘Small World,’’ New York Times Home DesignMagazine,April18,2004, p.72. Matthew Erikson, ‘‘Age of Innocence:Wadsworth Atheneum Exhibition Reduces Childhood to a FewEssential Ingredients,’’ Hartford Courant, March 28, 2004, p. G1.

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engaged in conspicuous leisure for whom childrenserved as important accessories.

The cradle designed in 1857 for the firstbornson of firearms manufacturer Samuel Colt is thebest example of this Victorian tendency to put theprecious child on display (fig. 3). Standing fortyinches tall, it held the Colt heir on high, encased inan intricately carved shell of wood from Connect-icut’s charter oak tree. Adorned with elaboratesymbols of the Colt family (not just the family crestbut also eight colt heads and two rampant colt fin-ials), the cradle is, as the label suggests, ‘‘a virtualthrone . . . for a baby king.’’

At a formal level, the bentwood cradles pro-duced by Thonet Brothers in the 1880s, with theirsimple languid lines, seem diametrically opposedto the Colt cradle. Yet, the conception of child-hood underlying their design was not so different.Like the Colt cradle, Thonet examples raised the

precious object off the floor, encasing it in a shell-like container with elaborate fittings. An advertis-ing photograph reproduced in the catalogue showsthe Thonet cradle number 2 in situ, complete withan elaborate fabric canopy that echoes the night-gown of the sleeping child’s doting mother andcreates a visual vibration between mother and childwithout requiring physical contact between them.In short, the Thonet mass-produced cradles madethe accoutrements of heir worship available to themiddle class.

Famed for their bentwood chairs, ThonetBrothers were prolific manufacturers of children’sfurniture in the late nineteenth century, produc-ing cribs, high chairs, and student desks as well aschild-size versions of their adult chairs. Kid Sizeincludes examples of all these products as wellas pieces by other well-known designers. GerritRietveld, for instance, designed a range of objects

Fig. 3. John M. Most, carver, Colt family cradle, Hartford, Conn., 1857. Oak and velvet. (WadsworthAtheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Conn.; Bequest of Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt, 1905.1580.)

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for children’s use. His high chair and a handcart(both from about 1920 and in the de Stijl mode)are on display in Hartford, and a child’s cot fromabout 1930 and a high chair based on his adultZigzag chair of1940 are illustrated in the catalogue.Often overlooked in discussions of Rietveld’s work,these pieces help confirm his interest in progressivechild rearing, a facet of his career that emerged in1998 from Alice Friedman’s close reading of theTruus Schroder house.3

The children’s furniture of Charles and RayEames is better known. Thus, their small-scaleplywood chair of 1945 (with its distinctive heart-shape cutout) and their Hang-It-All clothes hookof 1953 (comprised of wooden balls in brightcolors, supported on a white armature of weldedsteel) will seem like old friends. Less familiar is aningenious mechanical ‘‘horse’’ they designed in1944. Made of four metal legs with broad woodenfeet that connect via two hinges screwed into asimple wooden seat, this horse looks nothing likethe realistic rocking horses of the Victorian era.But unlike those stationary steeds that only sim-ulated a canter, the Eames horse strode forward asthe rider’s body weight shifted from side to side.

In fact, the Colt cradle and the Rietveld highchair (the latter borrowed from the CarnegieMuseum) are two of the thirteen objects that theWadsworth curatorial staff added to the installa-tion, in part to fill gaps created when objects fromthe original exhibition were not available. At thesame time, they embraced the opportunity tomake distinctive contributions to the exhibition’scontent. Twenty-first-century ‘‘hyperinstruments’’(digital music devices designed at the Massachu-setts Institute of Technology Media Lab) acknowl-edge the extent to which computers have becomean important part of the material world of child-hood. A 1928 child-size battery-powered Bugatti(exquisitely wrought by the same craftsmen whofabricated full-size roadsters for adult clients) helpsunderline the exhibition’s heavy reliance on ob-jects created for social and economic elites.

In order to help a local audience make a moredirect connection to the exhibition’s themes, theWadsworth Atheneum staff included a wide rangeof American objects, some of them drawn from themuseum’s Wallace Nutting Collection, the largestcollection of early colonial American furniture,iron, and domestic arts in the United States. In

addition to the Colt cradle, these materials in-cluded a low rocking cradle from seventeenth-century New England; an eighteenth-century highchair; a child’s commode from about 1830; aShaker chair from about 1875; a 1930s high chairdesigned by Warren McArthur (resplendent in alu-minum tubing joined with compression fittings,it was borrowed from the Baltimore Museum ofArt); an electric scooter designed by SharperImage in 2000; and two Sting-Ray bicycles from1969–70. These last objects, complete with bananaseats, are most likely to trigger a nostalgic responsefrom American viewers.

As impressive as this array of European andAmerican furniture undoubtedly is, what sets KidSize apart is its refusal to focus exclusively on theWest. According to Lucy Bullivant, Vitra’s guestcurator, the goal of the project was nothing less than‘‘to explore and critically illuminate the changingrelationship between adults and children as ex-pressed in their immediate, everyday material envi-ronments in societies in and beyond the Westernworld’’ (p. 13). In this sense, the use of the termworld in the subtitle is merited. Indeed, the exhi-bition includes sleeping mats and a modern cra-dle from Africa; a brightly colored woodencradle from India; a play table and bathtub fromChina; baby carriers from Indonesia; hooks andfood baskets from Papua New Guinea; a bamboocradle from the Philippines; a hammock fromBrazil; slings (for transporting children) from Bo-livia, Peru, Ecuador, and Paraguay; and a Cheyennecradleboard and a cradle made by Native Ameri-cans living on the northwest coast of the UnitedStates.

This willingness to treat such diverse objects ascomparable and to acknowledge that they areequally worthy of the viewer’s consideration is re-freshing indeed, as is the organizational structurethat seeks to facilitate cross-cultural conversationsbetween objects produced in dramatically differ-ent contexts. Focusing on broad categories of hu-man activities, each of which is arguably universaland which together roughly follow the stages of childdevelopment in any culture, the exhibition is or-ganized around six thematic sections: sleep, basicfunctions (that is, eating, bathing, grooming, toilettraining), play, mobility (both caregivers’ methodsfor transporting children and the objects childrenuse to propel themselves), formal learning, andseating.

Despite these efforts, however, the organizerscontinue to see the world as divided into two parts,the West and the rest. This attitude is particularly

3 Alice T. Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House:A Social and Architectural History (New York: Harry N. Abrams,1998), chap. 2.

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clear in the exhibition checklist (published in thecatalogue), which provides dates for each of theEuropean and Euro-American artifacts, even if onlyto identify the century in which it was made. In con-trast, materials from Africa, Asia, Indonesia, India,and South America are not given dates; this is trueeven when the curators clearly know when an objectwas made, as in the case of a hook from New Guineaidentified as the work of a fourteen-year-old boynamed Kumbal. Divorced from their historical con-texts, these objects are rendered timeless. Seem-ingly isolated from the forces of modernity—or anyother social dynamic—they are transformed intostatic tokens of perpetually primitive cultures. TheWadsworth Atheneum curatorial staff is to be com-mended for determining dates for every piece in theexhibition and including that information on thelabels. But even their attention to this important de-tail could not undo the fact that the exhibition usesso-called non-Western materials as exotic ‘‘Others’’that re-center the viewer’s attention on the num-ber and variety of objects used by European andAmerican children.

That is not to say that objects from ‘‘beyond’’the Western world are denigrated—far from it. Infact, the most numerous non-Western objects inthe exhibition are sleeping mats from Africa andPeru and slings used throughout South America tostrap babies to their mothers (fig. 4). As the labeltext makes explicit, these objects enhance physi-cal closeness between infants and their parents—something that modern psychologists have come

to see as essential for the child’s sense of emotionalsecurity. Yet, these objects are treated almost inter-changeably and communicate relatively little abouttheir respective cultures. Instead, they serve tohighlight the Western tendency—particularly inthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries—to use fur-niture to mediate the physical interaction betweenchildren and their caregivers.

If the exhibition falls somewhat short of itsambitious aims, the catalogue goes a long way to-ward realizing the goals articulated by Bullivant. Inaddition to the curator’s statement of purpose anda fully illustrated checklist, the volume includestwenty substantive essays that consider the materialexpression of attitudes toward childhood in manydifferent cultural contexts and from a wide rangeof disciplinary perspectives. Much more than a re-minder of the exhibition experience, it offers itsown substantial contributions to our understand-ing of the relationship between children’s furni-ture and attitudes toward childhood.

The book itself was designed with care. Its al-most five hundred illustrations (many in color)present a rich mix of paintings, period photographs,and contemporary images that put the material cul-ture of childhood in its social, historical, and phys-ical context. Each page contains a thumbnail imageof a child’s head (a detail from an image for thatparticular essay) to facilitate the reader’s navigationof this massive tome. One design flaw was the de-cision not to use any of the conventional meansfor marking the start of a new paragraph; with the

Fig. 4. Mat, Aibom, New Guinea, modern. Plant fiber. Sleeping mat, Timbuke, central Sepick, Papua NewGuinea, modern. Bamboo fiber. (Museum der Kulturen, Basel.)

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transition indicated only by the white space left atthe end of the last line of the preceding paragraph,the text caused unnecessary eyestrain.

The catalogue’s twenty essays can be groupedloosely into four thematic sections. Overtly histor-ical in approach and focused explicitly on the Eu-ropean context, the first group tends to highlightthe extent to which modern notions of childhoodinnocence can make it difficult to interpret child-ren’s furniture of the seventeenth century. Thecradle and the baby walker were not simply a meansof protecting infants from the physical dangers oftheir surroundings. According to Noreen Marshall’sessay, ‘‘The Big Sleep,’’ the cradle was also under-stood to be a site where the child was particularlyvulnerable to supernatural forces; fairies were mostlike to snatch human babies from their unwatchedcradles, leaving changelings in their place (a legendthat, Marshall posits, was used to explain the birthof a child with Down’s syndrome or other disabil-ity). Likewise, Sally Kevill-Davies’s essay, ‘‘The WideWorld,’’ makes it clear that wheeled baby walkerswere intended to counteract the animalistic tenden-cies inherent in ‘‘untamed beasts’’—preventing in-fants from crawling like animals and encouragingthem to walk within their first twelve months (p. 51).Walking frames may have protected toddlers frompainful falls, but they did nothing to protect mobileinfants from rolling into the domestic fire.

Another essay in this group is ‘‘Die Kindersraube,1991,’’ a cultural history of the children’s room. Inthe hands of a less-skilled historian, this essay mighthave been a discussion of the visual tropes of child-hood found in nursery furnishings and furniture.But Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann recognizes the es-tablishment of such ‘‘play paradises’’ as just one ofthe cultural practices that members of an emerg-ing middle class used to distinguish themselves fromthe urban poor (p. 30). Thus, Weber-Kellermannalso looks closely at the memoirs of working-classchildren to flesh out their experience of living incramped rooms. Often hungry, these children knewhard work from their earliest years.

The next four essays address children’s per-ceptions of the world around them, arguing forfundamental cognitive differences between chil-dren and adults. Although the authors tend toagree on the importance of play as children’sprimary mode of accumulating experiences thathelp them build cognitive skills, they differ some-what in the implications of that observation forchild-centered design. Following Walter Benjaminand Roland Barthes, architect and anthropologistFranco La Cecla deplores the modern reliance on

manufactured toys and their tendency to facilitate‘‘the imposition upon childhood of preconstitutedmeanings’’ (p. 71). Cultural critic Renato Pediolikewise values what he calls ‘‘sovereign play’’ (inwhich children invent their own rules) and con-trasts this mode of play with games in which chil-dren learn rules accepted by the outside world(p. 83). Rather than dismissing manufacturedtoys, however, he challenges designers of educa-tional games to preserve within them a degree ofsovereign play. Gunter Beltzig, himself a designerof playgrounds and playground equipment, alsoquestions modernist attempts to stimulate the child’simagination with abstract forms, which, he argues,work instead to ‘‘rob the child of the freedom tointerpret its environment on its own terms’’ (p. 92).

Written by anthropologists, the six essays in thethird group focus, respectively, on attitudestowards childhood in pre-Columbian Mesoamer-ica and contemporary South America, in sub-Saharan Africa, in the People’s Republic of China,among the Iatmul of Papua New Guinea, amongthe peasants of northern India, and in Filipinovillages. Although these essays offer much-neededcultural context for artifacts in the exhibition, it isclear that the scholars themselves are somewhatflummoxed by their inclusion in a project focusedon children’s furniture. Florence Weiss, for in-stance, titles her essay on the Iatmul ‘‘People, NotFurniture,’’ while Gerhard Kubik argues that ‘‘Euro-pean children’s furniture cannot be compared inany way to objects produced in Africa.’’ Further-more, he warns that the very term children’s fur-niture can be ‘‘deceptive when used in culturalcomparisons’’ (p. 112).

All these scholars note the lack of children’sfurniture in the cultures they study, but they differon why that is so. In her essay on the People’sRepublic of China, Tina Wodiunig relates child-ren’s furniture to a European emphasis on indi-vidualism; in China, the concept of the ‘‘relationalself’’ (in which the ‘‘individual always perceives anddefines himself or herself in relation to other peo-ple’’ [p. 120]) made children’s furniture unthink-able. ( J. S. Bhandari makes a similar argumentabout children raised in joint families among thepeasantry of north India.) Interestingly, the collec-tive child rearing instituted after the Revolutioncontinues to de-emphasize individualism, althoughChinese institutions devoted to child care do usechild-size furniture. Among the Iatmul, Weiss argues,there is no children’s furniture because childrenand adults are equal. She sees furniture primarilyas an attempt to control children’s movements and

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(she implies) to control their minds as well. In aculture in which adults believe that children willlearn everything they need to know on their owninitiative, children’s furniture simply performs nosocial function.

The last group of essays focuses on twentieth-century designs for children’s use, touching on earlytwentieth-century Montessori schools; GiuseppeTerragni’s Asilo Sant’Elia nursery school in Como(built in the mid-1930s); the impact of the galleykitchen on children’s access to active play; the evolu-tion of Swedish design from the 1920s to the 1990s;Herman Hertzberger’s Apollo Schools in Amster-dam from the 1980s; IKEA’s impact on children’suse of domestic space (particularly since1990); Japa-nese Tamagotchi; and contemporary playgrounds.Although none of these essays directly addresses theissue, collectively they suggest that modernism hashad a special relationship to childhood. Not onlywere modernist designers (like Terragni) particu-larly eager to rethink the architectural forms of theinstitutions most closely associated with childhood(especially middle-class houses, schools, and kinder-gartens), but they also championed a formal lan-guage of primary colors and simple geometric formsthat has become closely associated with childhood.Perhaps modernists wanted to see themselves aschildlike—adults who were nonetheless capable offulfilling Maria Montessori’s claim about children,who, she said, ‘‘make us experience a humanity thatis better than ours, a humanity full of innocent vi-tality, strength, and beauty’’ (p. 181).

If the catalogue ends with a somewhat utopiannotion of childhood, it also highlights the gaps inthe exhibition proper. Thanks to the inclusion oftwo Biocars designed to challenge disabled chil-dren to play more actively, there is at least an ac-knowledgement that not all children share thesame physical abilities. Yet, the balance of the ex-hibition maintains the illusion that childhood is aninherently happy, healthy time, untouched by pov-erty, disease, or death. Labor is not a part of thisscene. The focus is also firmly on early childhood,neatly avoiding the traumas that often accompanythe transition to adulthood.

This remarkably cheery version of childhood isreinforced by the installation itself. Vitra’s undulat-

ing platforms may break certain conventions ofmuseum display, but they continue to isolate eachpiece, treating it primarily as an aesthetic objectwhile sometimes ignoring how it would haveactually been used. A case in point is the steel andmaple school desk designed by French architectJean Prouve in 1949. Presented on its own—thebetter to highlight its dynamic lines and ingenioususe of just four legs to support two chairs and adouble desk—it utterly fails to communicate theway that rows of such desks would reinforce school-room regimentation modeled directly on the fac-tory environment. Nor does it address the use of suchdesks in colonial contexts, as objects that trainedAfrican bodies to adopt French postures.

Perhaps that is expecting too much from afurniture exhibition. After all, many of the dis-played objects are consumer goods designed to per-petuate the illusion that an individual’s problemscan be solved through the act of consumption.Perhaps these objects and their necessarily crypticlabels simply do not lend themselves to communi-cating the types of critical perspectives that histori-ans can proffer in their dense texts. Yet, includingthe original sale price of each object, along with anidea of the income that a worker earned at the sametime and place, would go a long way toward helpingvisitors think about who could afford these goodsand who could not. Or what about including themore affordable goods available at Wal-Mart or ToysR Us? (Even such a suggestion highlights the extentto which modernist aesthetics—with their relianceon such Ruskinian notions as truth to materials—helped determine which objects deserved a placein Kid Size.) Displaying such goods upside down (sothat visitors can see the manufacturer’s label iden-tifying where each object was produced) would bea first step in understanding the global systems atplay in ‘‘the material world of childhood.’’ Identifythe age range of the workers who assemble goodsin those distant factories, and visitors might be ableto see the color and geographic location of thosewho forgo an idyllic childhood so that childrenin the United States and western Europe can enjoythe material trappings of one. In the end, we mightremember that children may be everywhere, but acarefree childhood is not.

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This content downloaded on Thu, 20 Dec 2012 15:14:15 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

This content downloaded on Thu, 20 Dec 2012 15:14:15 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions